Got the logs. Ok, I need the XML to verify, but it appears that your file has the TrueHD as the first audio track and the AC3 as the second audio track. Your TiVo cannot direct play the second audio track, it can only play the first audio track. So PMS has to remux the file to make the AC2 the first audio track. The TiVo doesn’t support hevc when direct streaming, so it has to transcode the video to h264. The TiVo also does not support 4k h264, so it has to lower to 1080p. If you want, try remuxing your original file making the AC3 the first audio track. See if that file then direct plays.
I get what you’re saying about the need to remux to move the audio track, but why is that?
Why does the Plex app for windows not need to do that, but the plex for Tivo does (for the same file)?
Also, the Tivo Bolt system I have does support 4K HEVC.
At least in other apps it does:
“TiVo says the new Bolt has 4K Netflix and YouTube apps built in, as well as HEVC and VP9 decoders to handle both sources.”
So if you’re saying the Plex Tivo app doesn’t support 4K streaming, well then that’s what we were saying since the beginning of this thread.
Totally different players. The Plex app for Windows uses a very powerful player than can handle almost anything. The player in the TiVo is whatever Tivo included in their OS, which is very limited.
There are 2 ways to stream a file. Direct play, which means just send the file and the player uses it as-is. This is where the TiVo has trouble. In this mode, it can only play the first audio track. So the video is fine, but it fails on the audio. The other mode is called HLS. This is whats needed for PMS to remux the audio to make it the first track. In this mode, the TiVo player does not support HEVC. Other streaming services like Netflix use the first mode since they only provide 1 audio track. Or it’s also possible these services wrote their own video player bypassing any limitations in the one provided through the OS.
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So Plex gets limited by the players provided in each of the different platforms, or OS limitations.
I didn’t know that. I thought Plex had it’s own native player that was being used platform to platform, but I guess that’s impossible.
But this leads to a different experience on every platform. 
We have our own player in certain cases. Plex for Windows/Mac, Android, iOS, and AppleTV. Some platforms it’s not possible and others we don’t have the resources to include them, but they may get it in the future.
Unfortunately yes. Even with our own player, you can still get different experiences because not every file is encoded the same way and you can’t get every platform to treat every file the same way.
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@anon18523487 BTW thanks for all your help and analysis.
Please forward the problem of portrait mode MOV video playback with the magenta blur I mentioned in my other post about Tivo problems.
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